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Date:	Thu, 8 Apr 1993 19:09:58 -0400
From:	haahr@mv.us.adobe.com (Paul Haahr)
Message-Id: <9304082309.AA16094@astro.mv.us.adobe.com>
To:	culliton@srg.af.mil
Subject: Re:  Speed of rc
Cc:	rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu

ok, now i understand what's going on.  yes, if you use test a lot in rc,
it will go slowly.  if your /bin/sh has a test builtin, that will run faster.
there's no surprises here, you're just comparing apples and oranges.

i think that there are two very good reasons that test is not built into rc:
(1) with one glaring exception (echo), rc really has no extraneous builtins,
and (2) the semantics of test are, at best, awful.  in addition, i know that
Byron hesitated before deviating seriously from the bell labs version of rc.

personally, if test had nice semantics, i would prefer to see it built in
to rc.  it doesn't.

paul

ps:  as many of you know, Byron and i have been doing a new shell, es, in
which we felt no obligation to be compatible with rc.  es needed to have
a builtin for doing some test-like things because path-searching is done
by functions written in es rather than c.  because of this, we exposed an
access function, which does many things that test does, albeit cleaner.